Constitutional Economics and The Calculus of Consent

James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock are widely credited with creating the Public Choice School. Its main elements include constitutional political economy, an analysis of different voting-rights regimes, and the insight that human beings do not suddenly sprout angel’s wings when they become government bureaucrats (hence, there is government failure as well as market failure). The latter is devoted to an investigation of the premises upon which a legitimate government is predicated, and to an understanding of human and property rights in a constitutional democratic order. In this paper, public choice constitutional economics shall be subjected to critique.